MIS Research Center Seminar Series
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM
1st Floor Auditorium, Carlson School of Management

Abstract

Health care systems have evolved around the concept of acute care and the treatment of infectious diseases. They perform best when addressing patients' episodic and urgent concerns. However, the acute care paradigm is no longer adequate for a world, in which chronic illness is a major health challenge facing all countries. In the U.S. alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently estimated that chronic illness is responsible for 70 percent of all health-related deaths and 75 percent of all health care costs. The aging of the U.S. population and increases in risk factors such as obesity ensures that chronic illness will be an even greater problem in future years.  

In this presentation I describe recent research that attempts to develop strategies for managing health outcomes, risk and cost in patients with chronic illness. I focus on work done over the past several years by a group of university and health plan researchers who have been conducting studies of decision-making in the care of patients with Type 2 diabetes. This group has used randomized trials as well as computer modeling and simulation studies to discover decision policies that balance variation in long term risk and the cost of care against improvements in short term clinical outcomes.  

Following discussion of this work I will argue that joint determination of clinical effectiveness and treatment costs is a necessary but missing piece of the information that is needed by payers and others who define policies (such as clinical guidelines) if we are to improve the value proposition in health care moving forward. The development and application of novel and powerful methods that identify and validate optimal clinical policies for managing the chronically ill patient is justifiably a high research priority, and one that has obvious and urgent public policy applications. This approach may also prove to be a promising starting point for efforts to improve the clinical value obtained from economic investments in future health care systems.

Biography

Paul Johnson is Carlson professor of Decision Sciences and adjunct professor of Psychology and Computer Science. He is a member of the Cognitive Sciences Center as well as the Center for Political Psychology. His research focuses on the study of expertise in complex problem solving and decision-making tasks, decision failures that arise from the misperception or misrepresentation of information (e.g., deception), and the use of knowledge resources and decision technologies in professional and technical work. Professor Johnson and his students have investigated decision-making activities of individuals and organizations in a variety of settings, including health care (diagnosis and best practice in the management of chronic diseases), auditing (fraud detection), semiconductor manufacturing (troubleshooting), software engineering (maintenance), and foreign-exchange trading. Professor Johnson's teaching interests include cognitive science, intelligent systems, knowledge management, and managerial decision-making.